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Check your bags, check your tags May 25, 2017

Welcome back to another two and a half months of semi-regular blog posts. Since May 22nd was the official International Day for Biological Diversity, I planned to tie my first post to that. I may still write something about it, but this post is going to be a public service announcement not to do what I did yesterday.

Public service announcement: When flying to Costa Rica, don’t make the normally safe assumption that you’ll be the only person with a particular style of backpacking pack on the plane. I was happily settled at my hotel when I opened “my” pack and discovered a stranger’s meticulously packed clothes. An hour or so later of talking to unusually unhelpful people at Southwest, and all I knew was that I was going to have to bring the bag to the luggage claim this morning, which would probably take an hour and a half each way in the morning traffic. They couldn’t even tell me whether my bag was still at the airport. So I went out to talk to the reception desk about a taxi.

Right after I got back, an email with the subject “I have your backpack!!” appeared in my inbox. It turned out that she’d made the same mistake I had, and had also left the airport before she realized it. She then executed a heroic piece of Google-fu and tracked me down based on the stuff in my pack. Even better, she was staying at a hostel only 40 minutes’ walk from my hotel. So we picked a shopping mall smack in the middle and agreed to meet there at 8 this morning.

Which we did, chatted a bit (Her: “At first, I thought they’d stolen all my stuff and replaced it with granola bars!”), and exchanged our identical green backpacking packs before heading out to tackle the rest of our trips. I’m still trying to decide whether I should email Southwest and let them know that we sorted our luggage issue out on our own.